[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again and today's topic of conversation, some thoughts on Elon, Vivek, Mikaela and the H1B visa blow up.
[00:00:19] Hi, my name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the Dispatchers, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
[00:00:37] First of all, happy New Year everybody. I hope it's starting well for you. Don't forget, if you are new here and you're not already a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you can give us a rating, some stars, a comment or two on whatever platform you're listening on, all of that really, really helps the show. And last but not least, if you want a daily episode of the Dispatchers podcast, Monday through Friday, go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a $5 monthly patron. That's patreon.com leftfootmedia the link is in today's show notes. I should also say that these episodes over the January period are going to be sporadic, so there's not a daily episode at the moment, but there are going to be sporadic episodes until we return in early February. Alrighty. So what am I talking about? Maybe you've been living under a rock or maybe you're a very wise person and you are doing more fruitful and beneficial things in life than following scandals and blowups that are happening in the world of politics, particularly in America, and then exploding all over social media and also the mainstream media. I seriously applaud you. If you have no idea what this is about. That means that you are probably living a very wholesome and beautiful life. So good on you. Unfortunately, I do know a little bit more about what's going on here and I thought I'd just share some thoughts about all of this. But just quickly, in a nutshell, I think it was, what, the day after Christmas, sometime around there, there's a bit of a blow up that happened on starting with Elon Musk actually tweeting, I think was the first incident. It doesn't really matter too much. I'll just give you the key players and what they said and what happened and then I'll sort of share my thoughts about all of this. So Elon Musk was tweeting about his support for the H1B visa program in America. And in theory the H1B visa program was set up to allow for highly skilled foreign workers that America might need within various industries, but who don't actually, like they don't possess normally the, you know, the appropriately qualified staff and personnel for these particular roles. And so in theory, we're talking here about top tier people with, you know, really, really, really important skills and they are able to get fast tracked and get themselves a visa so they can start working in America within various American industries and corporations, et cetera. That's, that's how it's supposed to work in theory. But by all accounts what you've actually got, what with this program is there are abuses that are going on and also some negative societal consequences of this program. It seems to be, well, this is certainly what the indication is and there is enough anecdotal, and I've even seen data charts and other things which would seem to indicate this, that the program is being abused. And also one of the side effects has been particularly, it seems that Indian workers in it, what seems to happen is they end up in management roles and then they are passing over American workers. So Americans who are qualified to do these jobs are not actually getting them because you can bring in workers from India and then you can pay them a much lower pay rate and they effectively become bonded to these big corporations. They work 80 hours plus a week and all the rest of it. They get far less in wages and remuneration for what they're doing. And so it's very, very helpful for I guess, corporates who want to save a lot of money, but it's not so good for American workers who are qualified but can't actually get these jobs. So that's, as I understand it, the issue here and what happened was Tweed, Twee. Gosh, his name's not Tweeter, it's Elon. I'm not even sure where I was going with that. But Elon Musk, who is obviously in the tech industry, he is what is sometimes colloquially known as a tech bro, one of those people, the Silicon Valley types, the San Francisco types, the Google types, you know, the people who came up within the new, I don't want to say nerdy because that feels derogatory. But you know, the tech industry and the computer guys, the Silicon Valley guys, that's his sort of world. The bread and butter of his life really is in that place. And he came out in support of this scheme and it's kind of hardly surprising. He's running a big well, more than one actually, isn't it? He's got a couple of big tech companies who really benefit from this scheme and he tweeted the following. Maybe this is a helpful clarification. I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration, the top 0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning. This is like bringing in the JOCX or wimbys of the world to help your whole team, which is mostly Americans, win the NBA. Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct. And as you can imagine straight away there were people who were like, hold on a minute here, mate, that's not actually how we should be thinking about a nation and its people at all. This is a very corporate way to think and it raises a whole lot of interesting questions. So basically Elon is one player, he sparks this, but then it really blows up when Vivek Ramaswamy tweets a much more lengthy tweet. And this one was where things got really messy. So Elon is really, I think speaking as a tech bro, you could say a guy who's in this world and who's in this industry and has a very corporatized, tech driven way of thinking about the human person and society. And it's a way of thinking that I actually don't think is healthy and I don't think it's good. But you can understand what's going on here. Then what happened was Vivek tweeted out and we'll talk about Vivek's tweet in just a second. Some of the people who are, I think rightly have criticised this, but really, really laid into him over this. And I think possibly they've been a little bit unfair in the criticisms that they've made of Vivek about this tweet. So let me read to you his tweet. First of all, the reason top tech companies often hire foreign born and first generation engineers over Native Americans. And that's in quote, as in he means American born people as opposed to first nations or American Indians, like Native American Indians. Isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit a lazy and wrong explanation? A key part of it comes down to the C word culture. Tough questions demand tough answers. And if we're really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the truth. And this is what he suggests. The truth is our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long at least since the 90s, and likely longer. That doesn't start in college. It starts young. And that's all in capitals. Young. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech in Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel in Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact. And this is a little side note he's got here. I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates. More movies like Whiplash, Fewer reruns of Friends, More math tutoring, Fewer sleepovers, More weekend science competitions, Fewer Saturday morning cartoons, More books, less tv, More creating, Less chillin. As in chilling out. More extracurriculars, Less hanging out at the mall. Most normal American parents look sceptically at those kinds of parents. Quote unquote. More normal American kids view such those kinds of kids with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s, or even now, who raised their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest, normalcy doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our arses handed to us by China.
[00:09:36] This can be our Sputnik moment. We've awakened from slumber before and we can do it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritises achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness. That's the work we have cut out for us. Rather than wallowing in victimhood and just wishing or legislating alternative hiring practises into existence. I'm confident we can do it. Now, as you can imagine, that tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy exploded. There was a massive pushback, and I think rightly so, because while there are certain truths in there, there are also some very bad and wrong ideas. And a little bit of poison mixed in with your wine does not produce a good outcome. Even if you started with a really good, well aged wine. It's a very bad thing to have happen. And so People rightly pushed back and said, hold on a minute, first of all, what are you actually saying here about American people? And I saw a really great tweet, actually, from a conservative dad who said, look, I'm not sure exactly what I'm being accused of here and what he suggests that my kids are not doing that they should be doing, because, you know, we're actually fighting here for our kids to live a normal, healthy, well balanced life, not a life of excess in either direction. So one excess you can have, which is probably widely recognized, is hedonism. You know, people just give in to their passions and their lusts and there's no restraint with virtue. So that's probably quite well recognized. But another type of excess you can have. And we have all got to work hard at this. I'm actually planning a podcast episode probably for next week where I share a few thoughts and a bit of a story about my 2024 experience, because this actually sort of affected me again, I fell into this trap. It's something I've got to struggle against in my life as well, is the tendency to fall into the excess of trying to turn your life into a utilitarian, corporatized type project where you value your worth or the worth of your family or your nation or whoever, and, you know, the people around you, your country, your culture, et cetera, based on its technical outputs, its engineering outputs, all that kind of stuff. And basically output and utility becomes the measure of value, which is actually not a good thing at all. There's an excess there. So work is important.
[00:12:15] And work, you know, there is a time for everything under the sun, the scriptures tell us, and this is really, really important. But there is. So there's time for work, but there's also a time for rest. And he doesn't seem to have actually calculated a healthy balance, a genuinely authentic, humane and human life. This is more like a dehumanized ideological vision of the human person as simply being like a cog in some big corporate or state machine to achieve ideological or political outcomes, no matter what they happen to be. And there's an excess in that, and that's not a good thing. And so people, right, pushed back and then this whole thing starts to explode. And what you then get is people who start accusing the conservative critics of what's going on here, of what Elon and Vivek are saying, because a whole lot of people who supported Donald Trump rightly pushed back and said, hey, hold on, you've criticised this visa program previously. You've rightly highlighted the abuses, the excesses and the problems with this. And you've said, we actually need to start favouring our own American people, our own American workers. Again, that's the whole point, surely, of our local government. The local government should actually serve the common good of the nation that it's supposed to actually be serving, not some global interests, not some corporate interests, but the local people and the local common good. And you've rightly pointed out this is not happening with this scheme. And so people were, and I think rightly so, they pushed back against this and they were critical of all of this and said, this is not good. And this thing blew up. And then what happened is inevitably, I mean, this is just the way of the world now is you get people who then accuse the critics of being racists. And so they say, well, your real problem is identitarianism and you are thinking solely as a white identitarian and you're racist against Indians. That's the real issue here. That was never the issue. There might well have been a tiny, tiny minority of racists sort of floating around the edges of this. But that's not the actual heart of the argument, that's not the debate, and that is certainly not the majority of and the heart of the intelligent critiques of what's going on here. People are not critiquing race. They are talking about the very heart of and these really big concepts of what it is to be a nation, what it is to be a people. You could put this debate into any nation and replicate this exact same scenario. So let's say this was in India and they had some visa scheme that was importing Americans or English people from the UK or something like that into their country. And you could have local Indians making the exact same arguments. It would have nothing to do with race. It's about the common good of the local people and what it means for the government to actually govern according to the common good. And this is where Mikayla Peterson enters the picture. And it was kind of really strange. I saw her tweet, she tweeted in response to all of this, like, a couple of days later, this is about three days after this has all exploded, and she tweets out the following. Why did the woke right pretend it was illegal immigration they were against when it turned out it was immigration in general? And again, that's not what people are arguing here at all. That's never been the argument. No one on the conservative side of the fence, despite the fact that she's calling them woke, right? We'll get to that point in just a second. But no one on the conservative side of the fence is saying there should be zero immigration. Instead, the problem is unfettered immigration, an immigration that is not actually being run humanely according to the common good, and immigration that is being run according to a combination of corporate interests and globalist ideological interests. And these things are not good. We can see that now. It is so blatantly obvious. You have to be, I think, in extreme denial or some sort of very dishonest person to not acknowledge that there is a massive problem in the west, actually several different problems that have all arisen because of a lack of. Of a proper and virtuous approach to immigration. So no one's arguing there should be no immigration. So I don't even know where she's getting this from, but that's her argument, at least be honest. She goes on about it. There's assimilation into the culture and legal immigration. What is the problem, other than skin colour? So here's Michaela Peterson, the daughter of Jordan Peterson, accusing people of being racists, accusing people of a straw man that they're opposed to all immigration, and of course using the absurdly stupid term woke. Right? You've heard me talk about this previously on the podcast. It is a fabricated term by James Lindsay and Constantin Kissen. It is an absolute nonsense. There is no such thing as the woke. Right, In a nutshell, and I don't want to re litigate all of this, but what they are doing is they are conflating behavioural traits with ideological doctrines and they are not the same thing. Woke is a set of, or it's a term, a colloquial term basically, for a set of ideological doctrines.
[00:17:38] Now, just because you can see certain types of behaviors that are shared in common across all people of different philosophical, religious and ideological persuasions, like, for example, they have a belief in their own identity. We'll get to that point in just a second.
[00:17:55] Just because Wokists have a belief in identity and so do people who are conservative. And of course liberals have tried to erase identity, which is a major error. That doesn't mean that a person who has a sense of identity and the importance of identity is woke. Just because woke people place an unhealthy and a completely dishonest. So it's not truthful and philosophically flawed ideological approach to the question of identity and how it should be applied in a society, but that's how they're trying to use it. They're confusing these two things. Like I said, previously, you can't claim that the Spartans, the ancient Spartans, were Nazis just because they favored Spartan supremacy and ethnic identity. They favored physical fitness and, you know, bodily health. They practiced eugenics and they had a commitment to military prowess and they had specialized fighting units. So do the Nazis. But that doesn't mean that Spartans are Nazis just because you can see similar behavioral traits. There's a whole different set of ideological, philosophical and religious things going on between those two groups. And you can't just discount those things. Like these liberals, that tiny minority of them, there's two or three of them who are trying to use and gin up this woke right claim. And so here's Michaela Peterson using this absolutely absurd woke, right label for people who are conservative. And I'm not even sure why she's wading in. I saw this tweet and I was like, mikaela, just stay in your lane. You do great little podcast interviews. She does. She. She has some interesting conversations that I've seen. But here she is wading right into the middle of something that she clearly doesn't really understand. And it's just insulting and abusing people. And as someone rightly pointed out, Aaron McIntyre, who has written a great book called the Total State, which I highly recommended, his was, I think, one of the first replies to her, and he quoted or transliterated her father, Jordan Peterson, you know, where he says, basically, you know, sort out your own bedroom in perfect order before you, you know, criticize, you know, the world. And you say this idea, you know, put your own life in order before you go and try and solve the problems of the nation or the world. And he's sort of transliterated the quote here, and he said, set your own country in perfect order before you criticise the world. And of course, they're talking about Canada, and Canada's an absolute mess and it's got all sorts of issues. And so people, again, rightly pushed back. But this is like, this is what happened. Basically, people said, ah, they're all a bunch of racists. And then there was this whole thing of this is a civil war. We'll talk about that point in just a second. And then, of course, this is where James Lindsay enters the fray. And James Lindsay, who we were just talking about, the guy who's invented the term woke, right, he's a liberal. And basically what's happened with James Lindsay is he spent so much time examining and critiquing Marxism and modern Marxism and cultural Marxism, basically Wokeism. He spent so long staring into the abyss that now he's seeing Wokeism everywhere. And he's like, it's so low IQ from a guy who's got academic qualifications. It's not funny. Just the other day he quoted a quote, was it not Stalin? Was it Stalin or was it Marx? I can't remember which one it was. But one of them, he quoted a very brief couple of sentences from them on the idea of nationhood. And it's a long standing principle throughout human history of national identity and what it is to be a nation. And he said, see Stalin, I think it was, or maybe it was Max. Sorry, I didn't. I'm away at the moment, by the way, so I'm sort of flying a little bit blind in places here. I'm not in my office, so forgive the quality of the audio if it's not quite as good. And also my inability to double check everything here. But the point was, what he was trying to do was make this totally invalid comparison. Look, this, you know, bad Marxist guy held a belief about nationhood and so do conservatives. They have a belief about identity and nationhood that was held by this Marxist guy. So they must be woke, they must be Marxists as well. And it's like, what are you talking about? This is utter nonsense.
[00:22:04] Like, even a broken watch tells the time right twice a day. Just because a guy like Marx or Stalin has evil and bad ideas, that doesn't mean that every idea they have is evil and bad. This is such a simplistic and a logical take on human history. And especially when you consider that the concept of nationhood that he was enunciating has been held throughout the entirety of human history, right up until really about 70 or 80 years ago. It's the post World War II consensus that comes on the back of liberalism and then gives rise to neo conservatism, which is ultimately just another rebranding of liberalism.
[00:22:43] That's when we lose sight of these important principles.
[00:22:47] And now he's trying to suggest that these long held human principles and truths, you know, are suddenly confined solely to one ideological group. The evil ones, of course. And then anybody who espouses nationhood, for example, is part of that evil group. And James Lindsay tweets out, look, this whole thing is, I'm transliterating here, by the way he tweets out, basically saying, look, this proves my thesis about the woke, right? This proves who these people really are. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, what are you talking about? What an absolute grift to come in on the back of a Completely different conversation and debate about policy, governance, immigration, workplace policy, corporatisation, etc, etc, and then to grift off the back of that and say, see, this proves my thesis about a woke, right? It's just utter nonsense. It doesn't prove anything of the sorts. Unless, and this is what I was alluding to earlier, you don't actually believe or have any identity, any personal or group identity of your own. James Lindsay, and I know that that's not true because he identifies himself first of all as being anti woke. So that's an identity and that's a grouping by which you identify yourself. And he also obviously identifies himself as being a liberal, a classical liberal. Right, but that's an identity group. This is that, this is the actual, this is the shtick, this is the con of liberalism. It wants to on the one hand, act like there are no labels, there are no identities. We all have this common blank slate, humanity of one kind or another. And it depends which kind of liberal you go back to. So someone like Thomas Hobbes has a very Protestant total depravity view of human nature. Rousseau has that sort of original state of man, that original state of nature that's, you know, that is inherently good and pure. Both of them are wrong by the way.
[00:24:40] But the point is that they have this idea of, of a sort of a stripped down universal type humanity that in theory is supposed to be identityless and prior to any form of community or identity that you might choose as a liberal. So you choose that if you want to, but you're not born with any of that sort of stuff. That's the theory basically in a nutshell. But the point is that is just not true because then the con of course is that liberalism is an identity. It's a super theory, it's a view of reality and of the world. It's a religious view, ultimately it's a view of the human person, it's a view of morality, it's a view of how societies should be structured. And so on the one hand it's saying oh no, there is none of this stuff. And then it actually is proposing its own view of it but pretending like its identity. And identitarian view of the world is actually a neutral, non identitarian view of the world, the whole thing, things an absurdity and a madness. But here's James Lindsay anyway trying to run a grift and say, see, these people are just a bunch of identitarians. It's all about the white man and his employment and his work based I guess, flourishing. It's, again, he's sort of trying to play a little bit of the racist grift here as well. It's kind of like Michaela Peterson, but it's absolute nonsense. And I think what happened with Michaela. So James Lindsay is just sort of trying to grift to promote a very bad and wrong idea he's calling woke. Right. Mikayla Peterson is someone, I think, who felt that she had to chime in because she's misunderstood what's going on here and also because I think she has the sense that she has to defend Elon, because really, Elon Musk has done the world a great service in purchasing Twitter and opening up the space for Twitter to actually be a place where we can have conversation. But of course, what also happens on the back of this, and this is where things get a little bit more problematic with Elon. I love that word, don't you? New Year, new words, problematic.
[00:26:32] Obviously, I'm being facetious. It's not a new word. But I digress, however, and what I was trying to get to was the fact that things became problematic for Elon Musk, when, first of all, he starts, there appears to have been some censorship or some punishment and blowback from Twitter against people who critiqued Elon Musk. Now, this is where things, I think, are a little murky, because some of these people, it does seem that maybe they're consistently sort of violating some other terms of service. And I also think some of them, they just got nuts and they just went over the top themselves in their own criticisms. But Elon also blew up, and at one point, he just says, f your face, like, he tweets that out to, you know, to people who disagree with me, he blew up. Now, subsequently, he's walked things back a bit, and he has actually acknowledged now, a couple of days after the fact, that there are problems with this scheme. And, you know, that, yes, this does need to be reformed. And so he seems to have acknowledged that basically, you know, he blew up quite passionately in one direction, and he sort of made a bit of a mistake. And so he's walked some of his stuff back. As I said, he is a. He's a typical tech bro. He's in the space. And so it's not particularly surprising. But as I said, the problems were when he's abusing people. Now, I can understand why this is happening. Some people, when it comes to Vivek Ramaswamy and also Elon Musk, they have, I think, wrongly said, oh, this is a Mask off moment. They're showing us who they really are. That implies that they've lied and they've hidden who they really are. I don't think they've ever done that. If you've been astute and well reasoned in listening to and engaging with these people and understanding who they are, you will know that they've never tried to pretend they are anything other than who they are.
[00:28:10] They never pretended to be conservatives on these positions. They just didn't. And so I think it's wrong to say this is a mask off moment. Secondly, here's what else I think is important to understand and maybe I think people are missing here, or some people are missing here, is that this is very typical of social media. Social media, you don't engage well with the full facts. It's the animal brain, it's the race to the bottom of the brain stem. They want you reacting. And so we are very reactive on social media. And also our filters tend to come off and we tend to feel the pressure and we tend to react and we tend to say things that we wouldn't otherwise normally say and we just feel the need that we have to put something out there. And often what happens is we don't properly think through, like as some have rightly said. I think it was Sam Hyde who's referred to this as a lack of first principles thinking on the part of Elon and Vivek, and he's absolutely right about this. And same for Michaela, there's no first principles. What are your first principles of good governance, of moral virtue, governmental leadership? That's missing in all of this. Instead it's about utility, it's about function and all the rest of it. And I think that that's true and that's part of the world in which these particular men inhabit. But I think the reason as well is because social media doesn't encourage first principles type thinking. It's more reactive. And also what happens is it's very emotive and people don't really stop and think through often what they're posting. And that's why you've got Elon Musk blowing up in totally unvirtuous ways and telling people to f their face and all the rest of it was just like it was just madness, basically. And Vivek, I think he felt the need to defend Elon on Twitter and so he jumps on and does his thing. But it's not like he's sitting there probably thinking properly through his thoughts before he produces this quote unquote manifesto he's just sort of putting stuff. The whole thing's a mess. And Michaela Peterson, she feels the need to defend Elon and. And yeah, it's a mess, basically, in a nutshell, as the end result of it. But let me spend the rest of this episode just sharing a few thoughts of my own about all of this, because I think there are some deeper things that are worthy of consideration here. First of all, despite what some are claiming, this was not a civil war within conservatism or within maga. That's clearly not what's happened. If this was a civil war, it's ended very quickly, a matter of days, and it's all over again. In actual fact, I think this is a great example of something that we haven't had for a while now, and that's really because of the WOKE ideology and those on the progressive left who have suppressed actual legitimate debate. And debate is healthy. And that's what you had here. You had people defending various positions and defending those positions quite brutally, honestly and quite stringently and sometimes lacking in virtue, like when you're telling people to F their face. That is absolutely without virtue and shouldn't be happening. But the point is there was strong, healthy debate going on here and that's actually a good thing. It wasn't a civil war. And as you can see already, as a result of this debate, which some have pointed out played out entirely or almost entirely on Twitter, and the mainstream media was nothing more than an observer. They were just reporting what was going on. So people are on Twitter, this new and opened up Twitter, thanks to Elon Musk, and they're actually debating very serious high level governmental policy questions and philosophical questions about governance. And that's actually a really, really good thing. And it's fascinating that the media is not the place where that's happening. They're just observing this and then commenting after the fact. Now, in relation to this, I got a sense that basically some people didn't want debate with Elon. It's almost like what's happened for some people, I think is they've, and I think rightly so, they look at Elon and they see the good that he's done and they see the positive there. And then what they do is they elevate him to a status which is not healthy, where they effectively say, you can't question anything that comes out of his mouth. No, that's not good. That's not healthy. It's actually a good thing for people to push back on other people, no matter who they are when they are wrong or when there is debate about what they're actually saying. Which brings me to some of the bigger questions here. So there was a lot of back and forth, Elon Vivek and others talking about, you know, making America great again. And America needs this and needs this visa scheme because America has to be great. And this is what it takes to make America great and all the rest of it, that kind of rhetoric. But here's some interesting questions to consider in this. What actually is America? Is America? Because I look at what they're saying here and I say, well, I don't think you actually are meaning America like authentically what America is a nation of people with a shared history and a shared sense of identity and who they are in the world. I don't think you actually mean that when you use the word America. I think based on what else you're saying here that you're thinking of American corporations. So this is what it takes for American corporations to dominate the global corporate scene. Or you know, rather than Americans the nation, you mean maybe perhaps America as purely a geographical location that all sorts of liberal blank slate economic workers come to. And then America the geographical location again, it's another version of American corporations will be great or maybe even America as a type of brand. I think it was Sam Hyde and his critique on this. He talked about this idea from Ben Shapiro that he says is wrong. And I think he's right. It is wrong. This idea that America is just nothing more than a set of ideas and people come into America and they align themselves with this set of ideas. But in actual fact that's not true. That's not what a nation is. That's not what a people is. They have a shared connection to the land. That's why I find myself bristling back quite hard against this very recent phenomenon here in New Zealand of referring to the tangata whenua, which means the people of the land, and saying that's mori people. And then you've heard others on the other side recently using the phrase tangata tiriti, which is people of the treaty and that's supposedly the rest of us. So we're not actually people of the land according to them. Even though my, the Malone side of my family have been here for what are we now? Six, with my kids, I think six, maybe even more on the other side of the family actually might even be six or seven generations now. And they have been absolutely people of the land. I mean this is our land. We have never known any other land. And so I find myself frustrated by this idea that we're not somehow people of the land as well. And, and that's a sort of side note digression. But the point is that a people are not simply a set of ideas. They're not a geographical location. There's a shared history, a connection to the land. There is, there is a sense of identity and it's real and meaningful. Now liberalism doesn't like that. And particularly the globalist sort of ideology that sprang up on the back of this Post World War II, it likes to think of people as just being blank slates that you can just plonk in any nation and you know, they can just realign themselves effectively, they can be reprogrammed. And I think, particularly if you're in the tech bro world, you tend to think in this way as well. You, you tend to apply, wrongly, your technical expertise, you could say your technocracy, your technocratic knowledge, your technical knowledge and skills. You start applying it to areas of the human person into human life where it shouldn't be applied. So you start seeing everything through the lens that like for example, a computer programmer or an engineer would see the world. The engineering lens is perfect for engineering. The computer programming lens is perfect for computer programming, but that's not what a human person is. And we shouldn't be seeing the human person and nationhood and everything else through that same lens. Which leads to the next obvious question. What is greatness? When you talk about this idea of America being great again and what it takes to achieve greatness, what exactly do you mean? Do you simply mean that they are dominating the technical and engineering space? Does that simply mean that they're the first to get to Mars, as Elon has spent a lot of time talking about? Because if that's what you mean, and that seems to be what's being referred to here, like some sort of economic prowess that doesn't seem to serve any greater purpose. Any higher good. Like economic strength should always be at the service of a higher good. Otherwise what you're going to have is you're going to have greed and economic excesses and injustices where human persons are treated as cogs in the machine to achieve what you've wrongly elevated to be your greatest good, which is economic supremacy. And this is exactly what happened with the Tower of Babel right back at the beginning of human history. We will make Babel great again. We'll build this tower. We will. We'll be great. It'll be our technical prowess that will show the world that we are effectively like gods on Earth. And of course, we all know what happened there, right? Because that's actually not where greatness is found.
[00:37:29] Like, there's a really interesting question in all of this. How many hours should a person actually be working? Vivek Ramaswamy seems to think that every waking hour should be spent at work. But the authentic traditional Christian understanding, which I think is the right one and also other cultures would have this as well, is that, no, that the human person shouldn't just be a cog and a machine and they shouldn't just be at work constantly. The human person should have a sense of. This is anyway the Christian vision, a sense of kairos time rather than just chronological time.
[00:38:04] It's not just about the sense of every waking hour is about making money or working. Instead, I am working in some way, and even my rest is a form of work. But that's not what Vivek is talking about. He's not talking about a complete and full life, which would view even our human rest as a type of healthy work, a different type of work than, say, I don't know, laboring away out in the fields or being an engineer for a software company.
[00:38:29] But it's really fundamentally important. And when you have kairos, which is God's time, you realize that everything, all of our life, belongs to him. And that the Christian vision is that we will rest for eternity in God, that is our eventual home. So our rest here on Earth actually is fundamental and important. It's a foretaste and it's a sign of that life that we are actually created for and destined for. That's the original vision of life and the totality of work and everything else in the garden before the fall. There's a sense in which their work and rest and in the presence of God is sort of all one total package. And a lot of that is really messed up now. And so there's this really interesting question that underlies all of this. Well, how many hours should people be working? Are you great or are you better if you're working 80 hours a week? I'm not sure that anyone actually does work 80 hours. And others, again, Sam Hyde, I think, was quite prescient in critiquing this. No one really does that much work. It's just not really possible.
[00:39:31] They spend a lot of time at work, but maybe they're not doing that much work. But should anybody, even if they were able to do that, should they be doing that? And I would say no, they shouldn't. I've found myself stuck in that trap. And I'll share in a future episode, maybe next week. Actually, about how this almost burnt me out at the start of 2024. Falling prey to this mentality. It's not a healthy or good thing at all. Your greatness is not found in your utility. And this is really important. This is another important point in my list of thoughts about this. Human persons are not simply utility. They are not simply functions. They are not blank slates that exist to serve another purpose. The human person. And this is where Kant and his categorical imperative is actually right. The human person is not a means to an end. The human person is an absolute end, a good in and of themselves. They are the imago dei. Now, does that mean that we shouldn't work? No. Does that mean that we shouldn't serve higher goods? No, of course we serve the highest good of all. Or we're called to serve the highest good of all. And our flourishing is found in serving and conforming ourselves to an imitation of Christ, conforming our life to the life that God calls us to. Right? That is a good. But the human person is not a utility. It's not we. We are not a blank slate function that exists to serve some state interest. That's how, you know, tyrannical ideologies think. We are not some blank slate function that should serve some corporate interest. The Tower of Babel supremacy idea. You will work and make Babel great again. You know, that kind of stuff. No, the human person has an aspect of their life where utility does matter. So we produce things, we work and we look at the labors of our work and we create in the world and we say, this is good, we're made for that. It's part of imaging God. But when there's a disorder and when there's an excess there, we wrongly start to think that the fruits of our labor are our value or our soul value, that they are who we really are, that they are what we're actually made for. Which is not correct. And you get these kind of excesses and errors creeping in now underlying all of this and this whole debate. And Elon actually alluded to this at one or two points during the Twitter debate that was going on back and forth. And he's right about this. But again, they're not really sure how to solve the problem is the birth rate crisis, basically. This is something that I haven't really heard too many people talking about in response to this particular blow up. But basically what's going on here is we have not had enough children and we have favored our own wellbeing or, and I want to be fair and balanced about this, it's not just a problem of hedonism, that is one factor, but there is also a problem of corporate excesses and governmental failures that have basically made it harder for people to even have families. And that's a factor in this as well. But what's happened is that we've lost sight of a sense of kairos, of God's time. And so when you're existing in God's time, you realize that everything, even the future, belongs to God. And so you have a sense of freely being able to give yourself to greater and more demanding things like raising a family. You don't just look at it and go, well, I've only got four score and ten on this earth and therefore I'm here for a good time, not a long time. And why would I spend my money, you know, quote unquote, waste my money on extra kids? And why would I go through all that hardship when I could actually just live a really, you know, me centered kind of life? And not, I'm not even talking here necessarily about anything particularly selfish, you know, why would I sort of put myself through that hardship? You know, if you don't have that bigger vision, but when you're in kairos time, you recognize that everything, your whole life is not just what's here on earth in chronological time, but it's also what's to come. You have a sense of hope and you have a sense of a bigger calling and a bigger purpose. And so you embrace hardship and you embrace those things. You recognize that these things are actually quite important imperatives. And we don't just do them for our own benefit, we do them because God calls us to do them. And you have that sense. And so basically in the west we've lost sight of all of that. And this massive birth rate crisis has come in and then various policies that don't actually promote, encourage, support or nurture family, and then the erosion of family, the true family as well, on top of all of that. So ideological erosion and then the refusal to actually favour it for ideological reasons. It's a mess. It's an absolute mess. And we haven't had enough kids. And guess what? You need to sustain not just an economy, but a nation and also an economy and a way of life that we've become rather used to and we quite like now in the west in particular, which is a more comfortable life and one where you're not sort of Burdened by all the hardships and challenges, guess what you need? You need human persons to keep those types of economies afloat. The total state needs more people, but guess what? It hasn't prioritised or encouraged having more people. And so it's trying to use immigration as a mask, it's trying to import people. But here's the problem. Those other countries now, as of a couple of months ago, Africa now for the first time, because the thinking up until very recently was Africa would be the great hope of the world because they were the only place where consistently they weren't in a negative declining birth rate. So they weren't in a situation where they were having less people than what they actually needed to replace themselves. And so that was the hope, that Africa would be the hope. But in actual fact, now even Africa has gone into this exact same problem. It's a global problem. And so, like, what's going on here is the, there is an underlying problem here, a recognition we haven't had enough kids and what are we going to do? And the globalist answer is we'll just import people, we'll treat them like blank slates, we'll import them from another country, we'll give them a new set of programming and hey presto, we'll make America great again or we'll make Britain great again or whatever it is. And in actual fact, that's not how the world works. And also there's not enough people because it's becoming increasingly evident now that most countries are actually in a major state of decline. And this has huge ramifications. The current price of labour in China, all the talk about cheap Chinese labour, that's not going to be the way of the future because China in particular, because they had a one child policy and they favoured boy children, their fertility has got completely out of whack. They've got approximately 119 or 120 males for every 100 females. And they've got too many males, not enough females. And that means that your birth rates are not just gonna be. They already are precipitously declining, but they're about to actually fall off a cliff in a major way, because you haven't got a balance in the male female ratio when it comes to fertile young people to actually have children. And then on top of that, China also has been lying about its actual population data and they recently, like in the last 12 months have come out with new figures and even these might be still questionable, but they're far more accurate and they are lower than what they Actually, previously were claiming they were. And so the thought was that it was gonna be around this year that India would basically surpass China as the most populated nation. In actual fact, according to the new, recently released and more honest Chinese numbers, that happened about 10 years ago. So China's way further back into the problem than what people even thought they were. And so what you've got is a situation now where they haven't got enough new young labourers coming into the factories. And so what does that mean? Those workers in the factories will be able to make demands now because they can't simply be replaced. They can't be treated as a blank slate by the ideologues who say, we'll just chuck someone else in the factory. If you strike or complain, we'll just replace you. Can't do that. Haven't got the workers to do that. And that has an implication on cheap goods and the production of cheap goods in the world, because Chinese labor is basically. This has happened about 12 months ago. According to the experts, it's at the lowest point that it will ever be. It will never be this low again. It's only gonna go upwards. So you can see how all of this has massive implications. And so what's underlying this big debate is this issue, but no one's really sort of acknowledging or maybe even aware that's what the issue is. In a sense, liberalism perhaps has masked this. The way we think about people as blank slates. And all this talk of multiculturalism and how you're a good person if you support multicultural societies has masked these very corporeal, embodied realities that are lived through flesh and blood of human persons, that we haven't had enough babies. And so there's a mess. And we've. Like a lot of people are arguing about this and thinking, oh, this is racism and all the rest of it. And what they're missing in all of this is that this is other big problem here that's underlying this whole debate. Another part of this too, of course, is that the. Basically the liberal view of reality, the liberal ideology, has led to liberal economic landscapes. We've crafted entire societies and economic systems based on the liberal view of the human person and the world and the workforce and everything else. And that has not actually, like, this is the very order that is now collapsing around us. Because, yeah, it's. It's basically, it's a mess. It's an absolute mess of different factors. You've got this perfect storm. I've been talking about this for quite some number of years now, but You've got a perfect storm of events that have all come together, including market forces and liberal ideologies. And all of these things have led to a breakdown of community and a breakdown of society and a breakdown of, you know, just basic safe and sane and humane economic policies. And we are really in a very precipitous kind of position now. Like once upon a time when we weren't as globalized, like, probably a great example of this is Covid. Like Covid would not have spread as quickly and easily and potentially that means we could have possibly gone on top of it if we didn't have this globalised. I'm gonna get on a plane and I'm gonna leave China and I'm gonna be in another country in a matter of hours. There's a whole lot of flow and effects right from that. And I'm not saying necessarily those things are bad, but what I'm saying is the world changes on the back of these things. An economic one that might be a bit more relevant to think about is if you had a bank crash previously in, I don't know, America or China, well, that would affect the Chinese people. But once you globalize everything and build this global marketplace and global economy, guess what, everyone's now at the mercy of what happens in every other country. And there's a massive crisis that sort of comes on the back of this. Well, these liberal economic landscapes. And that's really an underlying factor in all of this debate as well. How liberals view the world through a corporatized lens often how they view the world and the human person in the economy, how they view human purpose. And we've talked about this previously in a rest and work and all the rest of it. That's definitely a factor in all of this. And another thing that's interesting here is, and this goes back to the. I guess my first point was, is Elon Musk really more qualified to decide how society should be? And some people clearly are treating him this way. Look, this guy's building these amazing spaceships and yeah, he's. Well, he's got a team of engineers that's doing this and he is, he's, you know, real entrepreneur in that regard. And look, look at the Tesla. And some people don't like Teslas and all the rest of it, but you know, there's an entrepreneurial kind of thing going on here. And look at what he did with Twitter. And yeah, this is great, but that doesn't mean that he is like some God king, some high priest who proclaims infallible doctrines and can never be and must never be questioned. In fact, ironically, that's technocracy. It's the very thing we want to avoid. But some people seem to be treating Elon, and certainly coming to his defence, as if somehow he's more qualified than your average, ordinary, everyday sort of citizen mum and dad, hard working, working class person who actually is more in touch at the coal face of the human experience than what Elon is, I would argue, and that's no disrespect or slight on him, it's just the truth. He's so high up the food chain and the economic class chain that this guy is nowhere near as connected to the reality of embodied living in community and the economic realities of ordinary people and the intricacies of human relations at a communal level. In his mind, he sees an engineering problem. He sees a potential source of workers he can bring into that country to solve his problem. He doesn't think at that minutiae level, he doesn't think at the ordinary, everyday, embodied level of what that means at the local level and what that means once communities start realigning and when ideas about the human person and ethics come into a society that didn't actually come from that society, now not organic, in fact, in some cases are quite wildly opposed to it. He doesn't consider those things. He doesn't recognize the reality of how this works at the coal face because he's not connected at that level. And it's very dangerous to treat him as if somehow he's more qualified to decide how a society should be just because he's a really great entrepreneur when it comes to engineering and creating companies that solve engineering problems and all the rest of it. It doesn't mean that he's an expert in everything. I once heard a great anecdote actually about an American Catholic theologian, highly regarded man he's passed on now. He was a cleric as well, but very, very astute man. And Cardinal Avery Dallas was his name for those who might know of his work. But there was a story I heard from a priest actually who told me this personally, who went over to America and who stayed with him and met him. And he said this guy was just a phenomenal theological mind. And he was, he really, really was. But guess what? He really struggled to do the basic things of just everyday, ordinary human life. That's like he was just disconnected from that side of things. His brain and his giftings were such. He, you know, he was in a very different space. And there's this story that this friend of mine who is a Catholic priest, told me about how the housekeeper arrived one morning and found him trying to be really Christian and charitable and helpful. He thought, I'll help my housekeeper out. I will load the washing machine with my washing. You know, why should she have to do that? He thought it'd be very helpful and do that. And she had to stop him because he was trying to load apparently his washing into the dishwasher. And so here's a guy who's phenomenal in theology and you wouldn't question in that space, you wouldn't say, oh, I know more than him about that. But the ordinary, everyday practicalities of, I guess, the mundane embodied reality of life he was disconnected from. And I think that's a good comparison perhaps to Elon and where he's at. And so I think that's an important question. In a nutshell, just to wrap this up, I think that this debate that we've sort of just seen in the last few days, this issue, is actually something that's at the very heart of the current moment. And it's a very important question. Basically, the liberal order is collapsing. That's why things are such a mess and we are in such a state of decline. Because the old order, the liberal order, is collapsing. Initially it had a lot of promise. Why? Because liberalism was stealing directly from the tree of Christianity. But it thought, quite wrongly, it could keep all of the good fruit that comes directly from the tree of Christianity and then add in a few bad ideas of its own and carry on as if this was just a natural state of affairs and you could create this religionless blank slate type society. And initially that seemed to be quite promising. Why? Because they were operating and living out these ideas in Christian cultures and then cultures that had a very strong residue of Christianity. But as that got eroded and forgotten over successive generations, guess what? It turns out that without that Christian religious vision of reality, then liberalism itself also collapses. It doesn't work if you don't have an authentic understanding of what the human person is and what virtue is and what nationhood is and what community is and all these other things. You can't just keep those things alive. You need a deeper sense of existential meaning. You need kairos time. That's how you have hope. That's why you do things that old. I think it's a Greek proverbial that societies grow great when old men plant trees that they know they will never be able to enjoy the shade of. Why would they do that? Because they're not Hedonists, they don't just think about the here and now. They think in terms of an eternal perspective. They think in terms of a perspective of generations. They see nationhood and society as bigger than just them in the current moment. And all of that stuff is dependent on a religious vision of reality. You can't build an irreligious, a non religious society. And right now, one of the big problems confronting people who are desperately trying to halt the collapse is they're trying to turn Christianity into some sort of secular utility type venture where, hey, you don't have to believe. You can just pretend like it's real. Now, there is a certain merit in that. It does keep away the worst excesses, but that's not the answer either. You actually need to have a core of people who do believe and really do live this. And they don't just pay lip service and go, oh, that's great for the Christians that support them and keep them alive, you actually need to invest in this yourself and live your life a certain way. And if you don't do that, you know, you end up in a collapsing, dying order. And so this is really quite an important debate because these big questions, what is nationhood? What is the common good? What does it mean to actually govern? Well, what does it mean to be a human person in an economic situation and framework and earning money? And why should you earn money? Like, what's the purpose of, of earning money? What is the point of work? Is it just solely for people to have money to spend as they choose? Or should there be fundamental, greater goods, a communal sense of our work and a communal sense of earning for higher goods? You know, money should be a fungible good. It's, it's not something that like, it's a transactional good. Some might say you don't just have money for the sake of having money. It's there to serve a higher good. You have it because you need to pay your bills or pay for someone's medical care, or buy a warmer, healthier home for your family, all those kinds of things, or provide for your children's future. You don't just hoard money for the sake of it. And we're in danger of losing sight of all of those fundamental truths. And so this is a really, really important debate and I'm actually glad it's happened. I think it's good. And anyone who's sort of naysaying and saying, oh, this is a civil war and it's not good, and we should all just agree to disagree. No, no, that's the wrong headed liberal approach. No, there are big important distinctions here because there is such a thing as truth and there is a debate to be had. If there was no truth, there would be no debate. There'd just be various relativistic, subjectivist, differing opinions. But that's not what the world actually is. There is a truth. There is the truth at stake. And so there are going to be debates because those debates are us striving towards the truth. If there was no truth, there'd be no need to debate. Debate would be wrong and evil. But in actual fact it's not. It's a good thing. And there's a whole bigger set of questions underlying all of this and the more we can probe away and push away at the edges and challenge the lies, the dysfunction, the mess of this broken liberal order. And then most importantly, live the if you're from the Christian persuasion, live the Christian faith with fidelity and authenticity. And that I say this, include myself in this. With all of our imperfections and sinfulness, we're not going to be perfect at this.
[00:59:53] But if we can do that and strive in the midst of challenging and debating those lies, then I think we're going to be better off in the long run. And so will our children, our grandchildren, and our great grandchildren. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatchers.
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